110: Things to Know About Your Thyroid
The blood test I took a few months ago showed that I have Hashimoto’s - an autoimmune thyroid condition. I was absolutely blindsided by this information. I don’t exhibit the most common hypothyroid issues like weight, fatigue or brain fog. In fact, I don’t experience any obvious health issues at all so this was very shocking to me.
Hence, my sense of urgency to tell you all about the thyroid. If I, a rather healthy, unsuspecting person, have a condition like this, how many other women are unknowingly walking around with a thyroid problem? How many women can’t lose weight or hardly get out of bed or can’t think straight or are losing hair or are constipated or have dry skin or have high cholesterol or just feel awful and can’t figure out what the problem is? It could be your thyroid, my friend! And most conventional thyroid tests don’t reveal the full picture of what’s happening.
Please tune in to this week’s episode to get this information. It could be the missing piece in your health puzzle.
EPISODE 110: Things to Know About Your Thyroid
SHOW NOTES
(0:00) Intro
Hello my friend! Welcome back to the club.
Today we’re talking all things thyroid.
(2:22) I was recently blindsided by my thyroid numbers.
I had a comprehensive blood test done that included a full thyroid panel.
Most standard blood tests do not include this and, unfortunately, it leads to a lot of missing clues.
I didn’t expect anything amiss with my thyroid as I don’t have weight or energy issues. Those are the most common symptoms when it comes to thyroid problems.
But I wasn’t making the connection with some lesser known hypothyroid issues like constipation, dry skin, lack of sweating and being cold.
(12:49) Some quick thyroid statistics:
10% of the US population, roughly 13 million adults, suffer from hypothyroidism.
But it’s believed that more like 40% suffer more subtle thyroid imbalances, so we’re talking around 52 million people. Women are much more likely to develop a thyroid problem than men.
1 in 8 women will experience thyroid imbalance in her lifetime.
(14:07) Intro to the thyroid:
Thyroid is a small butterfly shaped gland in your neck area, kind of under your adam’s apple.
It is your master metabolic gland - it regulates your metabolism. It controls the rate at which the body produces energy from food, which has a major effect on a person’s overall energy production AND heat production.
It also plays a huge role in regulating your body temperature. Thyroid hormones are used by every cell of your body to regulate metabolism and body weight by controlling the burning of fat for energy and heat.
(15:14)
4 major imbalances:
Overactive thyroid or Hyperthyroidism - the body makes too much thyroid hormone
Underactive thyroid or Hypothyroidism - the body makes too little thyroid hormone
Thyroid autoimmune disorders - Hashimoto’s and Graves’ Disease
Growths - things like benign cysts, nodules or cancer
Hypothyroidism:
“Fat, fatigued and foggy”
Mentally sluggish, depressed, cognitively challenged.
May experience parathesia which is that “pins and needles” sensation in your limbs or that they’re falling asleep.
Thyroid plays a role in the development of muscles - some hypothyroid people may experience muscles that tend to cramp or be tender to the touch. In fact, sometimes, fibromyalgia may be an underlying thyroid issue.
Because thyroid hormone is involved in how you mobilize or burn fat, and it’s involved in the liver’s synthesis of cholesterol, hypothyroidism can lead to increased LDL cholesterol and triglycerides.
If you recall from the podcast I did called a Functional Approach to Heart Health - I shared that I have - what is considered to be - high cholesterol.
The thyroid also produces a hormone called calcitonin that is involved in bone remodeling - the way your body utilizes calcium to maintain bone strength.
The thyroid helps regulate digestion and motility. It plays a role in secretion of hydrochloric acid - stomach acid - to be able to break down your food so your body can utilize nutrients.
For a person with a hypothyroidism, this can mean digestion is slow and motility is slow leading to constipation.
A hyperthryoid person would experience the opposite, revved up motility - pooping too much and diarrhea.
The thyroid helps facilitate optimal estrogen and testosterone production which supports a healthy libido.
It plays a role in fertility - having an underactive or overactive thyroid can create fertility issues.
Here’s another thing - postpartum thyroid issues and thyroid issues kicked into gear during perimenopause are extremely common. Just another little bonus of hormones going whackadoodle - after pregnancy and approaching menopause.
The thyroid helps promote healthy skin turnover and helps keep the skin hydrated.
Hypothyroidism can cause puffy and dry skin. It can cause hair loss. One of the signs of low thyroid output is loss of the outer ⅓ part of your eyebrow.
With hyperthyroidism, the skin may be prone to itchiness, hives or raised patches. Whereas with hypythryroidsim the skin will be cold, hyper leads to warm, moist and often flushed skin.
Undersweat with hypothyroidism, oversweat with hyper.
(22:03) Put on your nerd glasses with me….Lets dig in:
The first thing is your brain sends the message to the thyroid to make thyroid hormone as needed throughout the day. Your hypothalmus is like the big boss, and the pituitary gland is like the _______ - it carries out the directions of the hypothalmus. So the hypothalamus releases a hormone (TRH) that tells pituitary - hey tell the thyroid to make some hormone and so the pituitary gland releases a hormone called TSH and that’s the hormone that says - hey thyroid, makes some thyroid hormone. Now, this is often the primary marker that doctors test for and look at. Because if your TSH is high, it’s like your pituitary gland screaming at your thyroid to make more hormone. If it’s low, it’s like your pituitary gland telling your thyroid to back off and make less. The pituitary acts kind of like a thermostat monitoring the temperature. Do we need to kick the heat on or off. And your thyroid is like the furnace.
We definitely want to take this into account and see what our TSH is doing, but it’s not the be all end all. This isn’t giving you much insight or detail as to why the pituitary is yelling or whispering. Ideally your pituitary is doing neither and just calmly telling your thyroid to produce hormone.
So then your thyroid produces T4 and a little T3. Mostly it’s making T4 which is the INactive form of the hormone which then has to be converted into T3 and that’s the bioactive, powerful, fat-burning hormone that does all the things. T3 is the golden ticket.
Why do we even have T4, why this extra step, this middle man, why don’t we just get the direct hit of T3 and call it done? T3 is so powerful, it’s about 4 times stronger than T4, that a full on force of T3 without a little discernment about how much we need could cause problems.
T4 acts as a sort of moderator that helps determine how much your body needs - almost even like a slow release mechanism.
(28:03) Conversion Issues:
First things first you have to have the right nutrients to make thyroid hormone and support the conversion process.
The key nutrients for this are iodine, selenium, zinc, magnesium, trace minerals and Vitamin D. Lots of people are deficient in these nutrients. Do you remember that my Vitamin D was in the toilet when I had it tested? That was another one that surprised me but it’s certainly playing into my thyroid problem.
When it comes to conversion we have to look at the liver because that’s where Most of the T4 to T3 conversion happens, so if you have an overburdened liver - which we have talked alot about here before - it may not be able to convert well.
Some of the conversion process also takes place in your gut - and, again, we have talked alot here about gut issues - that can impair the conversion process. You’ve got to have healthy gut bacteria to help facilitate conversion .
(31:04) Let me tell you an interesting story:
My friend was asking me to take a quick look at her thyroid lab results, she’d had a full panel done by her functional doctor.
I found several of her markers pointing to a possible parasite infection. If she has parasites, that would create stress, inflammation and poor gut function all of which would impair conversion of T4-T3. So isn’t that interesting? She was like well what do I do? And I said, I’d go through the Cellcore protocol and be proactive about it killing off any potential parasites. So that’s what she’s going to do.
(34:55) Stress and Reverse T3:
Let me tell you about another player here which is Reverse T3 and is also there to help moderate this flow of hormone so we that we get the right amount in our system.
Reverse T3 acts as sort of a cellular brake - like whoa Nellie, back up, there, don’t need quite that much. It’s normal for some of the T4 to convert to Reverse T3, when we don’t need as much active T3 in the system - I kind of picture it like taking on the overflow. But what can happen is that too much can be converted into Reverse T3 not leaving us with enough active T3 . That’s not a good scenario either. We need the active, circulating T3 - that is the metabolic magic.
Stress is probably the biggest reason that too much T4 would convert to Reverse T3 but it can also be due to environmental toxins and other lifestyle factors.
If RT3 is high, that’s what we need to address - toxic load whether thats from food, chemicals you’re putting on your body, in your home, mold all that kind of stuff, and also stress. Always the stress. We need to support those adrenals.
(36:59) Antibodies:
Generally speaking, your immune system produces antibodies when it perceives a threat by a foreign or dangerous like substance - could be a bacteria, a virus, or even food.
This is why a leaky gut can be so problematic. If that gut lining is letting through food particles that aren’t supposed to be there, the immune system can see those as a threat. It can “tag” that food with an antibody and every time you eat that food, it’s like attack! This keeps your immune system on high alert, overworked, stressed out - all the things. Every time you eat that food, it’s like war in your body.
(38:45) Autoimmune conditions:
What’s believed to be happening when it comes to autoimmune conditions is that the immune system mistakenly identifies parts of your own body as a “foreign substance” and starts attacking. I’m not 100% sure I buy this.
Dr Rebecca Thomas the iridologist I had on the podcast - we talked about this exact thing and she doesn’t believe that’s the full picture of what’s going on either. You can listen to that episode here. I guess for me, I believe that God made our bodies SO smart, so intelligent, with all of the backup, and worst case scenario mechanisms built in.
For instance, some believe that the Epstein-Barr virus is super sneaky and can burrow into tissue and lay low for years and rear it’s ugly head once in a while.
It is SO important to know if you have an autoimmune component to thyroid.
You can get a thyroid diagnosis and maybe some medication, but if you don’t realize your immune system is going nutzo all over it, you’re going to have only marginal improvement and likely endure long-term damage.
And while there’s no “cure” for autoimmune conditions, there are plenty of people who manage it well, who reverse symptoms, who get those antibody numbers down into less dangerous territory or into normal ranges.
There are two antibodies you want to be tested for when it comes to Hashimoto’s:
TPO and TGB. You may have one or the other or both. I am high in TGB but not TPO. As much as I wanted to pretend I didn’t see that, it’s there and it must be addressed.
(48:30) The Genesis Prescription:
First things first, I prescribed myself The Genesis Prescription: making sure I’m getting enough of water, sun, grounding, plant and animal foods, sleep, movement and breath. If we’re not doing these basic things, we’re not giving our bodies the best shot at healing.
I definitely have some room for improvement in these areas. I suspect a lot of either people do too and so we are actually going to be focusing on this summer in The Chrisitan Health Club. We have Feast 2 Fast Purpose of the Body in May and then June and July we are Genesis Prescriptioning ourselves people!
(49:40) Dietary tweaks with Nutritional Therapy:
There are different considerations to make when you have an autoimmune condition - primarily we have to consider what foods may be potentially setting off the immune system - and, sadly, there can be a lot of them.
The top 5 are gluten, dairy, soy, corn and eggs. I have eliminated all at one time or another except eggs and so, with a very very heavy heart, I have to say that is one I’m eliminating for now. That alone - coming to grips with giving up eggs - took me a solid week to mourn before I could even bring myself to get started.
Gluten is non-negotiable with Hashimoto’s - you’ve got to take that out.
Gluten molecules look similar to thyroid hormones molecules and can make the body’s attack on the thyroid worse. It’s called molecular mimicry and it happens with other foods besides gluten but particularly for thyroid it’s critical to get the gluten out of your system.
(52:23) Closing thoughts:
Bio-individuality
AIP (Autoimmune Protocol)
Carnivore (ish) Diet
(59:30) Outro & Disclaimer
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!